Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Toad Away

 This is the weekly dispatch from Bizarro Studios North, where I have been writing and drawing the Monday through Saturday Bizarro comics since 2018. My partner and friend, Dan Piraro, created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.

Wayno 


The Saturday Bizarro recap is moving. As of next week (September 5), this post will become part of News from Wayno on Substack. If you're a regular visitor to this page, please head over to my 'Stack and subscribe (it's free!)

I'll probably post a link here next Saturday to catch anyone who might have missed the announcement.

I hope to streamline communications with readers by publishing the blog and the newsletter from one platform. We'll see how it works out.

Today's pipe pic has dual meanings for your cartoonist.

It's the cover of a 1977 LP by the Firesign Theatre, whose early comedy records greatly influenced my sense of humor, and the image parodies a 1955 oil painting by Bizarro's favorite surrealist, René Magritte.

Mysteries of the Horizon is one of Magritte's less familiar works. It features three men (or three views of one man) wearing bowler hats, a common motif in his paintings.

Just Folks... A Firesign Chat is less familiar to fans, and is not as well regarded as their earlier work. The group's ten-year contract with Columbia Records had been canceled, and they signed with Butterfly Records, primarily known as a disco label. They reworked bits from their 1970s radio program Let's Eat, but growing tensions within the quartet affected the performances, and the material was far from their best.

Groucho Marx and John Lennon both gave
permission to appear on the cover.

Their best work was very good indeed. Between 1969 and 1971, they released three classic albums: How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All; Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers; and I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus.

Cover art by Robert Grossman 

Those three masterworks cement their place in history as comedy revolutionaries, and the Library of Congress added Dwarf to the National Recording Registry in 2005.

Pardon the nerdish digression. We'll return to normal business now.

Future comics scholars will have to decide how this batch of gags rates in the history of Bizarro.

Monday's panel imagines a failed restaurant promotion.

The officer may be highly decorated, but is he tastefully decorated?

I've done a handful of gags referencing karaoke, including three of these multi-panel "favorite numbers" comics. I may have exhausted this idea, but one never knows.

The time of year dictated that we run at least one back-to-school (or stool) gag.

M.C. Escher is another artist we admire. His work is more geometrical than surreal, but it's often just as fantastical.

Editing is perhaps the most important part of writing. Cartoonists will tweak dialogue or a caption to cut unnecessary words or even letters. I wondered how many drafts Poe messed with when composing "The Raven."

Thanks for dropping by for the weekly Bizarro recap. I hope you'll consider signing up for the new Substack version, which will be delivered to your email inbox, saving you a trip to Blogger.

Bonus Tracks

Farmer Jason: "Ode to a Toad"
rrom Rockin' in the Forest
Courageous Chickens CD, 2014


Farmer Jason is the children's music alter ego of Jason Ringenberg, who has fronted the rocked-up country band Jason & the Nashville Scorchers since 1981. They recorded a blistering version of a Bob Dylan song for their debut mini-album.

Jason & The Nashville Scorchers: "Absolutely Sweet Marie"
from Fervor 
Praxis Records, 1984


I hope "Sweet Marie" serves as a palate cleanser after "Ode to a Toad..."


 

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Saturday, August 01, 2026

Don't Blink Or You'll Miss it

This is the weekly dispatch from Bizarro Studios North, where I have been writing and drawing the Monday through Saturday Bizarro comics since 2018. My partner and friend, Dan Piraro, created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.

Wayno 

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Alan Watts


Change affects us daily in one way or another. Over the past week, we learned that our favorite local music venue, owned by people who have become our friends, is closing its doors in a few weeks after fifteen years of hard work, excellent wines, and unwavering support of musicians. 

The co-owners issued a public statement, reading in part:
Although this is painful and heartbreaking for all of us, we remain eternally grateful for the love and support the community and the scene have bestowed upon us.

We stand in awe of the level of talent that has graced our stages over the years, and we implore everyone to continue to support them wherever they perform.

Please also let this serve as a call to action to do everything you can to support your local independent music venues, especially those that support and host local music. These rooms are the lifeblood of this art form, and they desperately need your patronage.

And though our stages may go dark, the memories will burn bright in our hearts forever.

I had the pleasure of performing there many times over the years, and enjoyed hearing countless wonderful musicians as a patron of the club. Even so, we now wish we had gone more often.

I believe that our friends who have run the business will come through this huge change all right, but we'll all feel the loss of a great place to gather for music and friendship for a long time.

Alan Watts makes sense when he suggests plunging into change to make sense of it.

It's also a good idea to remember that nothing we care about will last forever, and neither will we, so let's appreciate what we have while we have it (and while we're still around).

I found this meta image of a pipe smoking another pipe, but must also credit Bizarro reader Stuart VR for leading me to it.

Stuart sent me Craigslist ad for a pipe with a bowl modeled after a Star Wars character. It was crafted by a famous Turkish pipemaker, Sadik Yanik, and I posted that photo in June.

Naturally, I had to find Yanik's webpage, and spent a ridiculous amount of time browsing the selections, where I spotted the Popeye model.

So, we offer another tip of the Bizarro porkpie to Stuart for sending me down a Meerschaum rabbit hole a few months ago.

When I'm not wasting time scrolling through photos of cartoon character heads, I write and draw Bizarro. Here's the latest six-pack o' laffs.

The software may not be intelligent, but it certainly mimics human behavior.

July 20 through 25 was Crash Test Dummy week. It resulted from an intense writing session where the gags about dummies poured out of my head. I couldn't draw them fast enough, and my sketchbook pages are almost indecipherable. Rather than a normal gag-writing day, it felt more like a possession.

I ended up drafting a total of ten crash test gags. I used six last week, the above this week, and I have one more in the pipeline. The remaining two weren't strong enough to use, but I'll share them in my Substack newsletter.

It's a reserved preserve.

This panel includes a rare variant Secret Symbol: The Invoited Boid.

Thank you, Jerome "Curly" Howard.

My understanding is that Elsa Lanchester's real (red-auburn) hair was teased up and augmented for the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein film. I almost colored this panel in gray tones, but decided against it. The other character is my version of the wonderful Teri Garr as Ilsa in Mel Brooks's 1974 Young Frankenstein. Caricature isn't my strongest suit, but I was relatively happy with the likenesses of both actors.

These gents have seen too many Daffy Duck cartoons.

Shameless Commercialism
Just a reminder that the Comics Kingdom Summer Shop has a full selection of new and old Bizarro T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and other items, which help keep your cartoonist in caffeine.

Bonus Track

Daevid Allen: "Stoned Innocent Frankenstein"
from Bananamoon
BYG Records LP, 1971 


I'm an unashamed fan of the goofy 1970s psychedelic-space-hippie recordings of Daevid Allen (1938-2015) and his band/family/collective, Gong. Friday's cartoon reminded me of this tune from early in his career. 

I'm also quite fond of this quote on mortality from Daevid Allen:
I can only hope that during this journey, I have somehow contributed to the happiness in the lives of a few other fellow humans.


 

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Saturday, June 13, 2026

Lowe Frequencies

This is the weekly dispatch from Bizarro Studios North, where I have been writing and drawing the Monday through Saturday Bizarro comics since 2018. My partner and friend, Dan Piraro, created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.

Wayno 


Howdy, Bizarro Buckaroos. I'm back at Cartoon Corral after a week away from the drawing board and computer, so we're keeping things brief today. I'm fixin' to catch up on office biz and make more comics.

This week's pipe-smoking personality is the late King Hussein of Jordan, in a video screen grab from Albuquerque field correspondent Gerry J.

Gerry wrote: 
The King of Jordan was an avid ham radio operator like me. Unlike me, he was also an avid pipe smoker! Here is a screenshot from a documentary that shows him chatting on the radio with a ham in the UK.
Oddly, just before I received Gerry's email, we watched a documentary series called Wasp Woman: Murder of a B-Movie Queen, about actress Susan Cabot. It was fascinating and sad. Cabot had an ongoing romantic relationship with King Hussein (who had nothing to do with her death!).

Thanks to Gerry for the cool photo.

If you'd like to watch the short film about King Hussein the Ham, it's on YouTube (of course).

Here are the comics published while I was slacking off. The cartoon show must go on!

As my mind wandered a few months back, I speculated about what might happen if a mirror were placed face down on a scanner, and imagined this scenario. Hey, it might even prevent crashes.

I wish I had drawn the mime with a teardrop painted on his cheek.

It's "command-Z" if you're partaking of the Forbidden Operating System.

For this caption, I offer my sincere apologies.

Your cartoonist loves gags involving music and using inanimate objects as characters, so this one made me a happy ink monkey.

The food-gathering strategy of this species is the least efficient in the insect world.

Thanks for checking in. We'll have more of this stuff to share next Saturday.

If you crave more in-depth geekery and behind-the-scenes trivia, please consider subscribing to my free Substack newsletter.

Bonus Track

Nick Lowe: "Shake That Rat"
from Bowi
Stiff Records 7-inch EP (1977)


"Shake That Rat" is a surf-style instrumental with the bass guitar taking the lead. It was originally released on Bowi, Nick's smart-alec answer to David Bowie's Low album.

Nearly fifty years later, Lowe is still recording and performing, and his songwriting is better than ever. These days, he performs solo, or backed by Los Straitjackets, and he's worth seeing in any context.


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Saturday, May 30, 2026

Parlez-vous Musique ?

This is the weekly dispatch from Bizarro Studios North, where I have been writing and drawing the Monday through Saturday Bizarro comics since 2018. My partner and friend, Dan Piraro, created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.

Wayno 

There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS.
Samuel Adams (Boston Gazette, 1768)

Samuel Adams knew what he was talking about. The poor chap would be appalled by today's consolidation of print media, broadcast, and electronic news and opinion outlets by insanely rich abettors of tyranny who are scheming to silence free speech in favor of regime-approved propaganda.

A recent reminder of this warning was Stephen Colbert's Late Show coming to an end under shady circumstances that I needn't detail here. Colbert is a sharp and influential political commentator and, by all accounts, a genuinely decent human being. In short, exactly the kind of person thin-skinned tyrants hate and fear more than anything.

As the American Experiment approaches the 250-year mark, I ask those with the means to support independent, public, and community TV and radio stations, print/online publications, and other news sources not controlled by oligarchs, tyrants, or their bootlicking enablers.

Here endeth the PSA. We return to our regular cartoon programming.


When I first saw today's pipe pic, I thought it might be American actor Art Carney, but it's actually Georges Brassens (1921-1981), a French poet and singer-songwriter.


International Bizarro fiend correspondent Vince C. of Vancouver, British Columbia, discovered the photo on the "Le temps d'une chanson" Facebook page, described as "a radio program dedicated to French-language songs from the 1930s to the 1970s, hosted by Catherine Pépin."

Brassens recorded from the early 1950s through the late 70s. He was apparently a lifelong smoker, having frequently been photographed with a pipe emerging from his bushy mustache. I've been enjoying listening to his early recordings, despite the language barrier.

Thanks to Vince for the photo and for turning me on to Georges Brassens. Anyone who likes cartoons and music is my kind of reader.

Cartoons are another (albeit humbler) form of free speech, and here are my latest blatherings.

They're plugged in but disconnected.

Tuesday's panel imagines a new approach to counseling, which could be termed "couples regression therapy."

It's as easy as tapping your credit card on the Collection Plate app.

"Why in the world would you feel insecure, FretBot?"

Oh, yeah, right. 

(Screen grab courtesy of our pal Eric S.)

Have I exhausted the topic with the fourth installment? Who knows?

Ol' Punchy was bursting with pride to receive his city's medal of humor.

You Gotta Look Sharp

Summer's almost here, and what better way to show your good taste than by sporting a BizarroWear tee? Here's Jazz Pickle David R. sporting his Irön Bunnies öf Dööm shirt while visiting Ho Chi Minh City with his partner, Laura F.

You can become an icon of befuddling fashion by grabbing one (or more?) of the large selection of T-shirts and other doo-dads available in the King Features Bizarro Shop. We'd love to share more photos of readers modeling the tees.

That's it for the last post of May. We'll be back with a fresh post the first week of next month, as soon as Google lets me know if next month is Dectober or Junuary.

Bonus Track

Ben Vaughn Quintet: "Pièce de Résistance"
from Pièce de Résistance
Many Moods Records (2016)


Ben talks about this song and performs a solo acoustic version on a recent episode of his excellent new podcast, Straight From The Hat.

Oh man, that began as a list. I started keeping a list of French phrases that we use in America a lot, and then at one point decided to set up the music, and it came out sounding a little something like this.

I recommend checking out the podcast, mes amis!


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